as firewalls and intrusion detection, things Williford calls “speed
bumps” that may not prevent
intrusion but would deter intrusion
and give the operator situational
awareness to what may be happening. He advocated centrally
managed services and host-level
protection inside each enclave to
protect the network as a whole.

“How integrated a system is
generally goes to how much information passes through certain
central points and is shared and,
therefore, creates what we call pivot
points,” Young said. “A big part
of our protection strategy is to not
only minimize the access to get in
there in the first place, but then
minimize the effect they can have
from a pivot point.

“The more fully integrated a
system is, the more of those pivot
points it has. We try to minimize
those pivot points. But where we have pivot points, we
start to treat them as the crown jewels and say, ‘OK,
we’re not going to let anybody get to that pivot point.’
A legacy system may have very few pivot points, and
those pivot points cannot do it as much harm, so we
don’t have to protect them as much. That would be a
considered risk where we would say, ‘Hey, we’ll just
take that risk,’” he said.

Defending legacy ships and their networks offers its
own challenges.

“Our ability to get capability out to 272 Navy shipsvery rapidly is just not there,” Williford said. “We cameup with tactics, techniques and procedures [to] discon-nect items if you had the situational awareness that avulnerability had been exploited. For instance, the ship’sforce detects that something is in a given system. Howdo they disconnect that piece or pieces to prevent lateralmovement so you can fight through that process withoutactually impacting all of your systems?”The standards adopted by the Navy’s Cyber ExecutiveCommittee’s Technical Authority Board are being inte-grated into procurement programs if they have not yetreached Milestone B, system development and demon-stration. If a program is beyond Milestone B and intoits sustainment phase — such as a shipyard availabilityperiod — the standards are implemented when a systemcan be upgraded or refreshed, a situation currently gov-erning 80 percent of the ship systems.

With new ships in design, such as the amphibious
assault ship LHA 8, DDG 51 Flight III, LPD 28 and LX(R),
cyber security is being built in from the start. The littoral
combat ships (LCSs) were not designed with cyber security built in, but the Navy is adding it in the older LCSs
as they go through maintenance availabilities and in the
newer LCSs as they are built. The follow-on frigate will
be built with cyber segregation from the start and its
features may be back-fitted into the LCS.

“DDG 1000 is a little different because its networkis an all-encrypted network,” Williford said. “Anencrypted network is much more secure than an unen-crypted network. Most of our shipboard networks outthere today are non-encrypted networks. The HM&Eand the warfare system networks are connected, butnot to the information systems. It’s the encryption —that handshake — so one system sends something toanother system, it’s got to do a handshake that says, ‘Iacknowledge it came from this right person.’”The cyber challenges of protecting legacy systemsapplies to aircraft and their systems, as well.

“The world has changed from when some of these
systems were designed 20-30 years ago, and nobody
thought about a weapon system as part of the attack
surface to accomplishing the mission,” said Christina
Crowley, civilian deputy director for the NAVAIR
Cyber Warfare Detachment. “Dollars are definitely a
challenge. The constraint of our legacy systems is a

U.S.NAVYMissile and weapon systems can pose an additional cyber defense challenge because of theirreal-time capabilities. Here, USS Arleigh Burke launches an SM- 2 Standard Missile from the for-ward Vertical Launching System as part of their Combat System Ship Qualification Trials July 21in the Atlantic Ocean. The Spanish Navy Ship Cristobol Colon and Arleigh Burke were conductingcooperative air defense test exercises that included Tactical Data Link interoperability tests ofthe latest Aegis Baseline 9.C1.